The idea of a hero was never fluid in Tamil cinema. Despite Dravidian political literature and art forms frequently challenging the idea of mythical hero, cinema never made the space to explore the ambiguities of an anti-hero. Asuras could never become devas.
The bodies were to carry the dividing line. Heroes were handsome, genteel and fair skinned. Villains on the other hand looked as bad as they could, but not grotesque. Aesthetics and notions of nobility were incestuously related and entrenched.
Rajnikanth changed this. “He is not good looking in the conventional sense. He has small eyes one up and the other down ….. May be it is his mane, his facial contours or the Dravidian skin. What matters is, he is accepted and that is important,” remarked Sivakumar, a veteran Tamil actor in Gayathri Sreekanth's biographical account The Name is Rajnikanth.
Like the punches in the film, as a joke in circulation celebrates, his success knocked established notions so far out, even a Google search cannot find them. Not quite, but certainly his emergence marks a defining moment in Tamil cinema. This was not easy to achieve and there was no precedence or role models to adopt.
A critical analysis of Tamil films by M.S.S. Pandian shows that the model of Madurai Veeran, an anti-hero in the mould of Robin Hood, though a popular folk tale, needed a persona like M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) to effectively play the role, mobilise the subaltern and be well received. M.G.R is not a replicable model. Given the political climate of his time and his personal trajectory, Rajni could not possibly inherit the M.G.R legacy, even the anti-hero phase.
Gayathri Sreekanth would narrate that Rajni always wanted to be a successful villain not a hero. Though he could not get to achieve this in his first film “Apoorva Raagangal”, released in 1975, he did so in the second one “Moondru Muidchu” released in 1976. His performance as a village ruffian in “16 Vaayadiniley”, released in 1977, was refreshingly different and set the trend of the catchy one-liners. While the rest may be history, it was not free from controversies. In the period immediately following his initial success, Rajni was in the news for all wrong reasons — his stressed life style, quarrels in the airport, and fights with assistant directors. Not only his on-screen, even his off-screen image was far from perfect.
Contrasting the archetypes of hero and anti-hero in American films, John Fitch remarks that anti-heroes are adored because of their fallibility and they get closer to the fundamentally flawed human nature. Their inadequacies take them closer to the audience. Even as a hero, Rajni parodied, clowned and carved an accessible image. His imperfection is not a liability, but an asset. In many films, he would often evoke it explicitly without any awkwardness.
However, there is no ambiguity in Rajini's political space. It is clearly on the subaltern side, at least till now. Be it “Baasha” or “Annamalai”, two of his blockbusters, Rajini has always stood by the less privileged. In his films, he protected them, helped them get their due and stood by them in testing times. What Rajini convincingly conveys is that “ambiguities of everyday existence” need not be fully resolved in order to perform good deeds — a sharp contrast to the infallible and the ideal MGR.
Productive period
The late 1970s was also a period of new ideas in Tamil cinema. Bharathiraja with his “16 Vaayadiniley” broke new ground. Narration of stories changed for better, filmmaking shifted outdoors and the villages were back in focus. Ilayaraja's compositions were refreshingly different and overwhelmingly welcomed. Mahendran and Balu Mahendra made a significant impact with their films. Rajini benefited from the new climate and made the most of it.
What makes Rajini important is not the scale of his personal success, but how he turned around perceptions and created an alternative idea of a hero. His ascent paved way for ‘ordinary others' to establish themselves. Vijayakanth, the successful actor-turned-politician is a case in point. At the same time, his model, like that of MGR's, retains a uniqueness that cannot be replicated.
